Nvidia is worth four trillion dollars

On 9 July 2025 Nvidia's market value passed four trillion dollars in morning trading, the first company to reach the figure. It had been worth about $500 billion at the start of 2023, before ChatGPT's effect on demand for its data-centre chips became visible in its accounts, and one trillion that June. The January DeepSeek sell-off, which had removed nearly $600 billion in a day on the theory that efficient models would need fewer chips, had been reversed in full: the laboratories had concluded that cheaper training meant more training, not less.

The company that had sold the GeForce 256 to gamers in 1999 and released CUDA in 2007 was now the bottleneck of the industry. Its Blackwell chips were allocated rather than sold, its export licences to China were an instrument of American foreign policy, and the hundreds of billions of dollars the laboratories and their backers committed to data centres in 2025 and 2026 were, in large part, orders for its hardware.

The valuation is on this timeline as the measure of what Moore's law and the bitter lesson had come to. The field had spent seventy years arguing about algorithms; the market's judgement was that the arithmetic was the asset.